Ask HN: Is abuse from supervisors as common in industry as in academia?

I only spent a brief time in academia before becoming a software developer. This is my personal experience:

Academia: abuse was literally everywhere and it was a daily thing. Even some lab "assistants" whose career highlights were cleaning the lab and moving some objects around routinely bullied students (or at least tried to). Overall a very awkward and unsatisfying experience. Also this wasn't an isolated thing, it was happening at several departments of the same faculty.

Industry: I only experienced similar stuff in my first software development job, which was at a small startup. And the only guy who behaved like this was one of the engineering managers. As a developer -at least in my area- once you are considered mid level most companies treat you with serious respect.

I think fundamentally the difference is that the professor might not need you as much as you need them. They have their own research they want to be working on and students are little more than annoyances that need to be taken care of. For their real helpers they might have postdocs. In industry, you can typically get another job. But it's not so easy to replace a development team. So that makes the relationship more equal.

That being said negative comments still happen and I certainly don't think Academia is all bad. Academics work on stuff they are interested in. They get to go to conferences, make friends across the world and have a much more free lifestyle. These are privileges that should not be discounted.

Workers can be unhappy too, despite generally decent management. Burn out is a thing and you might want to read the threads on agile/scrum that often appear on this forum before deciding. On hacker news it's often said the half life of an engineer is only five years.

I think an important caveat is that, at least in American academia, your advisor should not have the same role as a supervisor, depending on the field and research arrangements. As a PhD student, you are expected to have care and motivation for your own research and situation: as sokoloff points out, the idea is that the student pushes and the advisor guides. You can, and in many cases are expected, to disagree with your advisor, and your advisor should not have complete control over what you are doing and how you do it. Similarly, it is usually seen as the student's responsibility to do what they need to finish their research and degree, not the advisor's responsibility to manage it. Ideally, an advisor is more of a mentor and senior collaborator than a supervisor.

Some situations I have known:

- A student who talked to many of their committee members as much as or more than to their advisor, and generally took their advisor's views on their research as suggestions to be weighed against their own and their committee members' views. In this case I actually think there could have been a reasonable complaint that some of their committee members paid more attention to the student's research than that of their own students. (A distinguishing factor here may be that the student was writing and receiving their own grants and fellowships, and was publishing papers and presenting at conferences on their own, however.)

- A student who disagreed with their advisor on a number of work, approach, neglect, and other questions, and switched to having another committee member as their advisor shortly before defending. (This student was supported by their old advisor's grants or by TAships, I believe.)

- A student where their committee disagreed with their advisor on dissertation readiness and pushed the advisor to allow a defense. (This student was entirely supported by their advisor's grants, and continued to work with their advisor after graduating. The advisor did not see the disagreements as attacks, but as an expected part of academic collaboration.)

- A student who outright had a nominal advisor (for departmental politics reasons) who had little role at all in their work, and who worked almost entirely with a committee member.

While I have never worked in industry, I assume that if your supervisor tells you to do something, you can't simply disagree and have this be the right choice, and you similarly can't decide to ignore your supervisor and do something else, or change supervisors on your own accord. In academia with advisors, the situation is different. Depending on funding situations, an advisor may actually have very little formal authority over a student at all.

I worked as a staff engineer in an academic research lab for 7 years and got to observe a wide range of interactions between grad students and faculty. I would characterize most of the bad relationships as a combination of neglect and poor communication (in both directions), plus general exhaustion on all sides. But there were definitely worse situations outside our department that I heard about secondhand. Life sciences seemed to be particularly prone to huge egos and abusive attitudes for reasons that I still don't quite understand.

In the 13 years I have subsequently spent in industry, I've been at large companies, small established companies, and startups. One thing I've seen a few times is that people who successfully finished a PhD and end up in technical management have a tendency to be ineffective, tyrannical managers. Kind of a "passing on the abuse" situation, sadly.

I think there are other factors at play, too. E.g., top-down power structures and rigid paths for students. A friend's advisor was bonkers: unhelpful and mean in person when my friend could find the advisor, but generally the prof couldn't be found. To the extent that the prof would hide in their office and pretend to not be there.

My friend of course eventually let other profs and the department head know, but nobody was willing to actually do anything, so she limped along like this for years with other profs quietly helping on the side. She eventually graduated with her PhD, so by the stats the system worked, but it was miserable.

For all tech's flaws, nobody expects you to put up with a miserable asshole boss for 6 years just to be allowed to stay in the industry. And unlike my academic pals, whose options at any point were generally ~0 and would sometimes spike up to 2-3, there are just an ocean of tech jobs. I'm about to start hiring again and competition is fierce.